Can’t Remember if You Ate Junk Food Recently? That’s a Side Effect of the Food
A usual suspect in weight gain and diet-related illnesses like diabetes, junk food is now being implicated as a culprit in memory loss as well. The kicker? It can impact memory in less than one week. Take note, bingers.
The news comes from a study conducted by the University of New South Wales in Australia and published in the recent issue of the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. According to the researchers’ findings, diets high in fat and sugar, “may restrict cognitive abilities after just one week,” reports Medical Daily.
Subjects participating in the study were assigned one of three meal plans for one week: “a healthy diet; an unhealthy diet emphasizing cake, chips, and biscuits; or a healthy diet taken with sugar water.” Using the first two plans as control groups, the third group was “an experimental diet aimed at isolating the effect of excessive sugar intake,” notes Medical Daily. According to the findings, “in both the treatment and the experimental group, subjects exhibited cognitive impairments after only one week.”
Senior author of the study, Margaret Morris, noted that the results suggest that “even a temporary diet high in sugar and fat may have alarming consequences,” reports Medical Daily. “What is so surprising about this research is the speed with which the deterioration of the cognition occurred,” Morris said in a press release. “Our preliminary data also suggests that the damage is not reversed when the rats are switched back to a healthy diet, which is very concerning.”
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